Is anybody in there? (Image: Skizzomat)
MINDS result from bodies, but that link can be compromised. If I severed my spinal cord at the neck, I’d get no inputs from most of my body, says Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University. “But I’m still a person, I still have experience, I can still think.”
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What if we could separate mind from body entirely? Many now believe that we will transfer our minds on to computers, whether in a matter of decades or hundreds of years. “I would say that it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable,” says Graziano.
What would life as an upload be like? We’d still need outside stimulation. Cut off entirely, a brain would suffer sensory deprivation, says Anders Sandberg at the University of Oxford. “It’s going to fall asleep, then hallucinate and probably gently go mad. You need to give it a way of interacting with the world, although it doesn’t have to be the real world.”
Being able to transfer minds into a computer would change how we valued a life. Having multiple backup copies of ourselves might make life less precious. “You kill one of them, so what?” says Graziano. “There’s a whole bunch more.” Murder may no longer be a heinous crime when we can resurrect the dead. The same goes for victims of freak accidents, says Sandberg. Just boot up the last save and the only thing lost may be a few recent memories.
“Murder may no longer be a heinous crime when we can resurrect the dead”
And if you think we are living in a hyperconnected world today, think again. Artificial brains would give connectivity a whole different meaning. “Forget texting, you can as good as stick a USB port in your head and communicate directly with somebody else,” says Graziano. “Now, we get into a totally different network of minds that doesn’t resemble anything we know.” Instead of inferring what is going on in someone else’s head, we could share thoughts like we share digital files.
A big concern will be who controls the computers that run the brain simulations. In principle, those running the machines could make copies of you, says Sandberg. “They could run you on a secret system with no connection to the internet and force you to do a lot of stuff.” We will need to drastically improve our software security in general, he says. “If it was a world where anybody could be hacked or copied at any time by unknown parties, it’d be a bit too scary to live in.”
Technical issues will abound. We may make mistakes during the upload process, and have warped brains sitting in computers. “Do you want a library of bad copies that you have some weird obligation to?” says Sandberg. The ethical conundrums become even more complicated if we assume your original brain and body stick around. Would virtual brains have equal moral and legal status?
Such questions are unlikely to be resolved in a hurry. “In many ways, we would become post-human,” says Sandberg. “We’d have made the leap from being part of the animal kingdom to going into an entirely new kingdom, and we don’t know what to call it yet.”
Read more: “10 discoveries that would change everything”
This article appeared in print under the headline “What if … We don’t need bodies?”
